Earlier this week, Nielsen released their latest report on where U.S. Internet users are spending their time online. Social media dominated all other categories at more than twice the time spent on the next closest category. It occurred to me after reading that report that social media is not where marketers spend most of their money. So, I wanted to look further into the difference between where users spend their time online and where marketers spend their budget. Here is what I found.
Marketers are not fishing where the fish are
Social media not only represents the area where users spend most of their time today, but that was the case a year ago. Social media saw the largest growth of all areas at a whopping 43% increase over last year. It was also the largest growth area last year tripling in usage between 2008 and 2009. Yet, Marketing Sherpa reports that marketers are spending disproportionately less on social media.
Search dominates the marketing budget
The darling of online marketing, search represents the lion’s share of online marketing dollars. Accounting for a mere 3.5% of time spent, search accounts for the most dollars at 31% of the total budget. Search is an important acquisition channel for marketers because users have intent to engage at the time they are searching, but when combined with the budgeting dollars spent on the website they land on; 58% of the total online marketing budget is way to high.
Email is used a third less than it was last year
Users spent almost a third less time on email than they did last year, yet it still represents 19% of the budget. In fact, Forrester sees the spend on email marketing continuing to rise through 2014. What?! Users spend almost three times as much time on social networking, but marketers spend about half as much on social. This is the biggest disconnect in the modern marketing budget allocation.